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zulily’s unique needs

“Something special every day” is our motto at zulily. Thousands of new products go live every morning. Most of these products are available for 72 hours and a good number of them often sell out before the sales event ends! Many of our engaged customers visit us every single day to discover what’s new. We want to make sure our customers don’t miss out on any items or events that may be special to them, while also giving them more confidence in their purchase decisions. A traditional eCommerce ratings and reviews model could help, but is not the best fit for zulily’s unique business model which offers customers a daily assortment of new products, for a limited amount of time. We needed a different approach.

Our solution

Our specific business requirements demanded a more real time and community-oriented approach. We came up with a set of signals that highlighted the social proof and scarcity. Signals like “Only X left” and “Almost Gone” were designed to encourage users to act on a product that they are interested in before it is gone. Signals like “Popular”, “X people viewing” and “Y just sold” were intended to give users more confidence in their purchase decision. We were quickly able to bring these signals to life, thanks to our real time big data platform. These signals were shown on our product pages and the shopping cart.

Product page

Shopping cart

Results

We tested the feature out on our web and m-web experiences. The results turned out to be better than our most optimistic expectations! It was interesting to note that the feature was almost twice as effective on the mobile device compared to desktop. In hindsight it made a lot of sense as our customers have a lot of small sessions on the mobile devices during the day and this information helped them make timely decisions. The social and scarcity signals turned out to be a perfect complement to zulily’s unique business model.